The shaping of Indian-Cinema

Influences: I would try to discuss the influences on both the resident Art-house cinema as also the Commercial cinema - the 'Margi' [classical] and the 'Desi' [regional] according to Sharangadeva's 13th century Sangeeta Ratnakara.:

The ethos, styles and expressions of Indian Cinema were majorly influenced by the following:

1) The great Indian epic-works like the Mahabharata, Ramayana, Panchatantra etc. influenced greatly the thought-process, value-system and imagination of the Indian masses, and also had a profound effect on shaping Indian-Cinema as well.

The well-known cinematographic techniques of side-story (an equally important fictional work where there is a definite start-, mid- and end- included in the main theme), back-story (a history or explanation which led to the present situation; a 'flashback' is a popular means of revealing a back-story), or a story-within-a-story (a 'layered' method of story-telling where one story is told during the continuation of another major story;  for eg. as in Mahabharata, the events of the War are related in great detail to Dhritashtra by Sanjaya thus constituting a story-within -a-story) were adapted from these great works.    

2) Another great influence on the structure of Indian Cinema was the colorful and lively traditional folk theatre of India, which became popular from around the 10th century. These regional traditions were the ‘Jatra’ of Bengal, ‘Ram Lila’ and 'Nautanki' of Bihar and Uttar-Pradesh and the ‘Terukkuttu’ of Tamil Nadu.

3) Ancient Sanskrit drama (led by such powerful playwrights as Kalidasa, Bhasa etc.) had a massive impact on Indian Cinema as well. With it’s highly stylized nature and emphasis on spectacle, where music, dance and gesture, it all combined together to offer an unparalleled dramatic experience. Sanskrit dramas were known as ‘Natya’ (the seminal work of Bharat Muni’s ‘Natya-Shastra’ specifically describes the proper way of staging a sanskrit natya), characterizing them as spectacular dance-dramas.

4) Distinct Parsi theatre effectively blended realism and fantasy, music and dance, narrative and spectacle to integrate into a dramatic discourse of melodrama. They invariably contained crude humor, songs and music, sensationalism and dazzling stagecraft, an influence of which was seen in  many ‘masala’ movies, a genre which started with Manmohan Desai in the 1970’s.

5) The Marxist agenda: Marxism set a model for large-scale state patronage of the arts, especially the cinema.  Marxist ideology-influenced Directors like Ritwick Ghatak, Saeed Mirza, Goutam ghose, Mani Kaul, Mrinal Sen, Shyam Benegal, Adoor Gopalakrishnan, Satyajit Ray, Buddhadeb Dasgupta etc. wereimmensely driven by their Proletarian-sympathies and left back some magnificent cinema for all of us to savour.

6) Another influence was Western musical television, particularly MTV, which has had an increasing impact since the 1990s, as is recently seen in the altered pace, camera angles, dance sequences and music of recent Indian films.

I'd like to point out here that the Indian 'Parallal' or Art-house Cinema movement was  greatly influenced, in addition to the above, by a combination of Indian theater (particularly Sanskrit drama), Indian Literature (particularly Bengali literature) and European cinema (the French and Italian neorealism).

Further Reading:

* "Seeing is Believing" Selected Writings in Cinema - Chidananda Das Gupta.

* The Cinema of Satyajit Ray - Chidananda Das Gupta.

* Wikipedia.org

**********************************

the "Tramp" trapped in "Modern-Times"

                 stuck in the wheels of modernization

Chaplin - who else can act silly the way he does..... smile, gaze, walk the way, only he does..... and touch, probe and smother your heart the way only He can!!

Modern-Times is another of Chaplin's great works. This 1936 'comedy' has the typical Chaplin-satire written all over it. The iconic-Tramp is shown struggling thorughout the movie, and fighting to survive in the modern, nut-and-bolts industrialized world. The film is a satirical-take on the desperate employment and dismal economic conditions people faced during the Great Depression, conditions created, by the efficiencies and of modern, insensitive, break-neck pace of  industrialization.

The movie opens with the Tramp (Chaplin) employed in a factory assembly-line. This character suffers the indignation of being force-fed by a 'smart' feeding-machine. The ever-accelerating assembly line, where Chaplin screws in nuts and bolts takes a toll on his mental-health and he's ultimately sent to a mental asylum. The gradual degeneracy of Chaplin into lunacy, owing to the increasing burdens of the profit-seeking, ever-accelerating machinery, and the subtle satire on the overarching inefficient system, is one of the many brilliant sequences of Modern-Times.

The sequence, where Chaplin is mistakenly arrested for being a instigator of a left mediated labour-demonstration, is hilarious and insane.....for the sheer depiction of it.

In probably the finest, inventive and most impressive moment of the cinema, Chaplin accidentally gets physically trapped, battered and bruised in the giant cog-wheels of the huge automatic feeding-machine he's operating. Chaplin's simple-yet-severe depiction of the impending-condition of the average human in the face of a rampant, ceaseless and insensitive modernization is brilliant!! (This scene was probably suggested to Chaplin by a young reporter, who informed him about the production line system in Detroit).

From then on, we are witness to some other escapades of the Tramp. He falls for an orphan, street-urchin (played by the lovely Paulette Godard, one of Chaplin's real-life wives), and from then on its a saga of the beautiful couple pitted against the ruthless forces of riches. Some other sequences follow, where we catch a glimpse of the talented Chaplin dancing on roller-skates blindfolded, to impress his lady love, not realizing he's near to a steep-fall!

A repeat of the caught-in-the-cog-wheels sequence follows, this time with Chaplin's superior, but while extricating him, the lunch-signal goes on, and the Tramp leaves his boss inside the wheels, because it's lunch!! Ultimately he manages to extricate him and lands himself another job at the cafe where the Gamine is a dancer.

Modern-Times ends with the Tramp and the Gamine walking down a road at dawn, towards an uncertain, but bright and hopeful future.

****************************

Modern Times is often hailed as one of Chaplin's greatest achievements, and it remains one of his most popular films. He directed, produced as well as did the screenwriting for this cinema. Chaplin began preparing the film in 1934 as his first "talkie", but abandoned the idea since he held a notion that the 'beauty' and appeal of the tramp character would be lost if he ever spoke! He was right!!

Chaplin IS Cinema

                                             Adolf and Charles: Its the hat!!

                                        
Definitely one of World-Cinema's, but maybe not his best, in The Great Dictator, the celebrated and immensely gifted Tramp effortlessly de-glamourises himself to play the Tyrant......and with the unmistakable gait, toothbrush-moustache, solemn and scrawny-hat and those dreamy-eyes, takes us to the very heights of imagination and satire. We, mere-mortals witness with awe the mind of this totally off-the-scale genius. 

Directed by Charles Chaplin and his half brother George Dryden, filming for the cinema began in September 1939, one week after the beginning of World War II and finished in a schedule of 6 months before being released in October, 1940.

This was perhaps Chaplin's first 'talking'-movie. That anybody could involve, express and engage so much in a 'silent-movie' devoid of the now-ubiquitous 'dialogues', stands testimony to this man's abilities; (see Modern-Times, City-lights, the Circus......).

It was the only major film of its period to bitterly satirize Adolf Hitler and Nazism (at a time when US was at peace with Nazi-Germany).  Chaplin's film advanced a stirring, condemnation of Hitler, fascism, anti-semitism and the Nazis.

The opening 10 mins. of this 'comic'-cinema lays thread-bare the virulent nature of War, where a cannon-ball is shown 'following' the hapless un-named Private (played by Chaplin).
As the play progresses, Adenoid Hynkel (Hitler, played again by Chaplin), the barbaric ruler of Tomainia, is shown on a victory march in the main thoroughfare where the handless 'Venus-de-milo' gives him the Nazi-salute and so does Rodin's, The Thinker, who still sits, but now has his arm raised – Chaplin’s exceptionally satirical take on the totally suffocated state of artistic-expression and of free-speech in Nazi-Germany.

As the plot unfolds, the ruthless Hynkel arranges for a meeting with Benzino Napaloni (a portmanteau of Benito Mussolini and Napoleon Bonaparte), the dictator of Bacteria. Chaplin’s ability to treat rather intricate (and maybe serious) issues to exquisite satirical humour comes alive in a comical encounter of the two dictators at the barber-chamber, where one scrolls up his own chair in a bid to outdo the other, in order to command a more 'elevated’ or superior psychological-position, with both eventually reaching the ceiling of the chamber! The scene is really funny, and effortlessly exposes the insecurity and one-upmanship of the psychotic dictators out on a power-trip. (Mussolini, has been documented to be worried about his small stature, so much so, that he often used an elevated platform on top of the stage, on which he climbed onto before delivering a speech).

The film's most celebrated sequence is, of course, the ballet which Hynkel performs in his palatial office with a balloon globe (signifying the world), the music set to Wagner’s Lohengrin Overture (which is also used at the end of the film when the Jewish barber is making the victory speech in Hynkel's place). The method and steps of dance, Hynkel’s totally-cold but childish non-chalance, total self-involvement during the dance regime and the eventual bursting of the globe draw a cold, eerie parallel with the way the world was manhandled and mauled by Hitler’s imperialist designs, and also how his dream eventually went ka-put.

‘The Great Dictator’ ends with the barber (now ‘dictator’ of Tomainia, owing to an earlier mistaken identity-swap with Hynkel) delivering an address in front of a large audience and over the radio to the nation, following the Tomainian take-over of Osterlich (reference to Austria). This passionate pro-democracy speech is widely believed to be a personal message of Chaplin to the world to shun mindless-violence, racist tendencies and create a new boundaries-less world of peace, hope, freedom and rationality.

Trivia:
Chaplin’s motivation for making this work of art was from the escalating violence and repression of Jews by the Nazis throughout the late 1930s, the magnitude of which was conveyed to him personally by his European Jewish friends and fellow artists.

The film was well received at the time of its release, and was popular with the American public. It was also sent to Hitler, who apparently watched it twice, actually liking it!

Watch this for the sheer creativity of this man, the effortless acting, the impeccablly-comical satirical sequences, the eerie coincidence (remember, this was made before the WW2 started) of things to come and the sheer brilliance of Chaplin!

Li’l help from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Dictator